Nonprofit Shrugs at Pleas to Conserve

Their other electricity customers may be following the Southern California Edison Co.’s plea to conserve electricity during the current energy crisis.

But don’t expect anyone to be going room-to-room flipping off lights and turning down air conditioning in a fourth-floor suite at one Marina del Rey office building.

That kind of conservation is “immoral” and “un-American,” say those working at the Ayn Rand Institute international headquarters on Admiralty Way.

The 15-year-old nonprofit group is run by devotees of novelist and philosopher Ayn Rand, who died in 1982. It is a clearinghouse and educational center for those who embrace Rand’s theories of individualism and laissez-faire capitalism.

Her philosophy, Rand wrote, “is the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity.”

Rand--whose first name rhymes with mine--is best known for the novels “The Fountainhead” and “Atlas Shrugged,” which together have sold 20 million copies.

Institute leaders are blasting calls for electricity conservation and the executive order issued last week by President Bush that directs operators of federal buildings in California to reduce energy consumption.

“Expecting the American people to lower their standard of living is an immoral idea,” said Yaron Brook, the institute’s executive director.

“Conservation is not a long- or short-term solution to the energy crisis. Conservation is the un-American idea of resigning oneself to doing with less--like a sick person who stops seeking a cure and resigns himself to living with his illness.” Instead, he said, market forces should prevail to increase power supplies and reduce demand.

On Thursday, Brook’s statements surprised officials pleading with Californians to turn off lights and reduce air conditioning to help prevent rolling blackouts.

“ ‘Un-American?’ I’ve never heard that before,” said Tom Boyd, an Edison spokesman. “We and other utilities are urging our customers to conserve electricity and use it wisely.”

Lori O’Donley, a spokeswoman for the California Independent System Operator, the agency that monitors power consumption and orders rolling blackouts when supplies run low, said that “there are times we feel conservation has made a difference” in calling or not calling for blackouts.

A White House spokeswoman said President Bush stands by his call for conservation.

“The president believes the federal government should do its part. He takes the energy crisis in California very seriously and believes it is right and appropriate to explore how we can conserve energy,” Claire Buchan said.

Brook disagrees.

The 40-year-old former Santa Clara University finance professor has headed the institute since last August. It has 16 staffers and operates on a $3-million annual budget financed by about 4,000 contributors--all firm believers in Ayn Rand’s philosophy.

Brook said he was a teenager living in Israel when he read “Atlas Shrugged” and was immediately converted from the concept of socialism to capitalism.

By coincidence, that novel features a countrywide blackout that is the result of massive government economic regulation. Rand writes on page 1,075 of towns “reduced to the life of those ages in which artificial light was an exorbitant luxury and a sunset put an end to human activity.”

The towns were ruined by “rations, quotas, controls and power-conservation rules.”

Brook said the institute’s Marina del Rey headquarters has thus far been spared blackouts. But at his Tustin home, he and his wife and two children turn off lights when they aren’t needed.

“I do it because I don’t want to pay higher electricity bills,” he said with a laugh. “I don’t want to pay for something I don’t use.”